The Global Forum

A month or two ago my friend Nikki suggested we go to the Global Forum to end Human Trafficking in October. It sounded great and it's something we're both passionate about, but it was in San Diego, and we're in Winona. And we had school. And hotel and airfare would be expensive. And it would be mostly proffesionals/abolitionists.

Needless to say we decided to go.

It wasn't hard to convince my roommate Helen she also wanted to go, and then the school gave us $300 from some diversity fund we didn't know existed to help cover costs. The way our fantastic seniorslidesemester schedule worked out, I only missed one day of class. I happened to have an important presentation scheduled that day, but something about my sweet talking skills or the fact that I control my proffessors caffiene addiction paid off. (Oh the joys of working at a coffee shop in college!)

The conference was October 8-9, so we packed up the car and headed to the cities to stay with my parents Tuesday night. My mom's a great sport and brought us to the airport early Wednesday morning. Our flight got in early enough that we had almost a full day in San Diego. Being college students, we took about 3 modes of public transit to get to our hotel and that ate up most of the afternoon. But it was warm. It was sunny. It was fantastic. I texted my mom Thursday morning to tell her I swam laps outside in the warm sunshine. She texted me two days later saying it was snowing.

The conference was fantastic. There were about 700 professionals, volunteers, law enforcement officers, social workers, researchers, politicians, musicians, business owners, ambassadors, and lots more. I learned so much from everyone I talked to. It wasn't a conference to tell us statistics or what Human Trafficking is - these were all people who knew the facts and were actively doing something about it.

Thursday night we had a concert, too. Brant Christopher, the lead singer from Dispatch, Jon Foreman of Switchfoot, and the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club came and played a sweet acoustic set for us. They also showed some fantastic photographs that broke my heart.

I became really interested in supply chains. The fact that so much of what we buy has been touched by a slave at some point along the line is sobering. We've all seen fair trade coffee and chocolate and that's fantastic, but what about cotton? What about pieces of our cell phones? What about the clothes I'm wearing right now? (http://www.stopuzbekchildlabor.org/)

It was encouraging to be around so many people with the same passions who could point us in the right direction. I have a stack of business cards and phone numbers of people all over North America (and the globe, actually) I'm saving for next year when I'm looking for a job. I have internship possibilities running around in my brain. I know that people are actively doing something to stop slavery. I am so inspired by the people we met and talked to. We brought back some new ideas for raising awareness, money, and new leaders in Winona. I got to hear messages from people like Francis Chan and David Arkless telling me "Don't let people calm you down!" and "We have to be on the absolute edge of our comfort zones." I don't think it's too niiave to say we can make a difference, and the movement has already started.

"Just because it's not my family doesn't mean that what's going on isn't an emergency." - Francis Chan